'Beasts of the Southern Wild' review: joy, danger and beauty in the bayou, through a child's eyes

There’s a sense in watching any movie that you’re dreaming, albeit wide awake and amid a community of strangers. We sit with our eyes open and we gaze at the impossible: instant shifts of space and time, improbable plots, music from nowhere, animation, computer effects, montages.

So if all movies are, to some extent, living dreams, what to say about a film like “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which is dreamlike and poetic and symphonic and magical in ways beyond the ordinary movie -- and beyond quite a few extraordinary ones, too.

“Beasts” is a fantasy, perhaps, or maybe an alternative history of recent events, or it could simply be a depiction of the world as seen and felt by a curious, apt, precocious, and intuitive young child. At times it moves like a hallucination; at times it feels like journalism or, perhaps more to the point, sociology. You’re continually leaning into it, wondering what’s real and what’s imaginary, what the physical and moral laws of its universe are, and where it all might go. The only thing you’re sure of, virtually from the very start, is that you’ve never seen anything quite like it.

The film is the feature debut of director Benh Zeitlin, who is adapting (albeit, surely, very loosely) a play by Lucy Alibar. It centers on a little girl named Hushpuppy who lives on an island in the Mississippi Delta known by its couple of score of inhabitants as the Bathtub.

The Bathtub sits outside of what Hushpuppy calls “the Dry World,” that is, the land protected by the levees, just as it sits outside of what the rest of us might call ‘civilization.’ It’s a broken-down place, built of and strewn with garbage, overrun by weeds and feral animals, bereft of work and school and government and media, and yet (or, perhaps, ‘hence’) it’s a paradise. The children are raised communally, the lines between the manmade and natural worlds have dissolved, a sense of play permeates the lives of young and old alike, there’s little longing or despair because there’s little need or want. From some vantages, life on the Bathtub might look like mere subsistence; from others, maybe, it looks like purity.

And yet, even through the eyes of wise-beyond-her-years Hushpuppy, who narrates and is largely the focus of the film, we can see that there are things missing from the Bathtub, and dangers in it. For one thing, Hushpuppy has no mother, and is being raised, if that’s the word, by her gruff and often drunken dad, Wink. And for another, an apocalyptic storm a la (if not actually) Hurricane Katrina hits the Delta, inundating the Bathtub and threatening its way of life. The residents take drastic measures to save their community, and Hushpuppy herself sets out on a personal voyage of discovery.

Zeitlin, in the vein of Terrence Malick, dances through his story like a milkweed seed in the thrall of a breeze. He brings us close to Hushpuppy but never quite puts us inside her head; she informs us and counsels us, but we’re mostly on our own in trying to puzzle out who the inhabitants of the Bathtub are to one another and which of the events that we watch are actual and which make-believe. The ominous, destructive creatures Hushpuppy refers to as aurochs, for instance: do they exist only in myth, or are they real, or can’t she tell the difference? And, finally, does it matter? What Hushpuppy believes is, in this universe, what we must take to be true. And whether she’s dreaming or hoping things rather than experiencing them in an objective fashion matters not from the side of the screen through which we experience the movie.

“Beasts” is shot, quite beautifully, by cinematographer Ben Richardson on 16mm, which gives it a raw, documentary feel, but it gracefully includes some moments of computer-generated magic which give life to Hushpuppy’s speculations on the nature of time and the universe. And it moves to strange and intoxicating music Zeitlin composed with Dan Romer.

But for all the beguiling quality brought to the film by its creators, the most unforgettable contribution is made by Quvenzhané Wallis, the tiny slip of a girl who plays Hushpuppy with enormous heart, authority and daring. Looking impossibly fragile and yet enduring whatever the Bathtub and the fates throw at her, she turns Hushpuppy into the most unlikely movie hero you can imagine: a child of nature able not only to withstand but to comprehend the infinitude around her. Wallis is, like crusty Dwight Henry, who plays Wink with offhanded, hazy humor, a newcomer to acting. But despite her greenness she carries the film on her wee little shoulders like a titan. It’s breathtaking.

“Beasts” won the Grand Jury and cinematography prizes at January’s Sundance Film Festival and four prizes, including the one for best first feature, at Cannes in May. Inevitably, that has led to a backlash, with some people complaining that the film is a muddled headscratcher and others that Zeitlin infantilizes and patronizes Hushpuppy and the other inhabitants of the Bathtub in a way that reeks of colonialism, white privilege and liberal guilt.

I would argue, rather, that what disconcerts here is not only deliberate but liberating: just as she lives outside of what the rest of us think of as civilization, Hushpuppy has no concern for ordinary notions of narrative, whether that mean causality or the obligation to differentiate realism from fantasy. As for Zeitlin somehow demeaning his subjects, surely that charge is leavened by the deep intimacy the viewer feels with Hushpuppy. “Beasts of the Southern Wild” brings you into a world you didn’t know existed with a closeness that the movies almost never achieve. If that constitutes exploitation, then it’s a crime which all works of art should aspire to commit.